Handling Digital Assets–Managing Content, Minus Limits

Digital asset management, an enabling technology, is pushing today’s commercial printers into the role of tomorrow’s information managers.

Digital asset management. Unarguably, when these three words are strung together, whether on a trade show floor or at a business luncheon, commercial printers take notice.

Grover Daniels II, president of Boston-based Daniels Printing, has a theory on this phenomenon. “The printer is the conduit for the delivery of content, whether the delivery vehicle is print or digital in nature,” he professes.

Daniels, a fourth-generation commercial printer, prefers to describe his family business as a full-service information provider that will comprise three interrelated business units: commercial printing, financial printing and, in the future, as Daniels projects, digital asset management services.

“Commercial printers must now be experts at data archival, retrieval and digital repurposing in order to meet and exceed the emerging demands for content,” Daniels contends. “The idea by which today’s commercial printers must operate deviates from the traditional print direction—embracing the expanded array of digital communication opportunities available today, opportunities that allow for communication without limits.”

Content Manager is a Web-based digital media and information management system for large corporations and financial institutions. The digital asset manager enables Daniels’ customers, and other users, to retrieve digital content and measure the status of production on a job-by-job basis.

“There is an overwhelming need in our industry for repurposing digital assets—for both print and Internet publishing—and for creating, storing and retrieving digital content quickly and effectively. Content Manager was born out of that,” states Daniels, who believes printers are moving to a different marketplace entirely as new digital asset managers, like Content Manager, take rise in the industry.